It will be almost four years since Star Wars last appeared on the big screen. And it must be said that it was also not very famous, because the way in which the director JJ Abrams and the entire creative team around Kathleen Kennedy concluded the new trilogy disappointed every fan who was at least a little judgmental.
Not much has changed since then. Kennedy is still leading Lucasfilm, fresh from a flop, the failure of which hurts us as lovers of the legendary archeologist with a hat perhaps a little more, and even though the company, after a few years of developing the brand in the series field, thanks to a general change in Disney’s strategy, will soon return to feature films creation, so far we have no indication that it should be much better.
Fortunately, this topic will not be about that. Instead of painting the devil on the wall, I want to go back in a few years (or even further) and gradually look at projects that were planned in the past, but as the title says, the circumstances did not favor them for various reasons. It won’t be sorted by anything, so prepare for chaos, because given the theme, “no system” is the most appropriate system.
The Force Awakens by Michael Arndt
In 2012, screenwriter Michael Arndt was hired to write a roughly fifty-page script treatment for the seventh episode of Star Wars. The author of the scripts for Little Miss Sunshine and The Hunger Games went straight to work, only to leave again after a year because his ideas did not correspond at all to what the studio wanted. What was the main problem? In Luke Skywalker.
Arndt later stated that he found Luke’s involvement impossible because every time he came on the scene, suddenly everything else didn’t matter and nobody cared about the main character, everything started to revolve only around this sacred figure. He thus tried to avoid all possible references to previous films in order to make room for something new. We already know how it turned out in the end, but this is probably where all the studio’s current problems in its attitude towards Star Wars movies started. Why come up with something new when we can keep repeating the old one over and over again, right?
Solo from Lord and Miller (a sequel)
Something tells me that if I watched Solo a second time today (I still haven’t found the courage or the time) I’d take it much better than I did back then in the cinema. I know most people balked at the mere idea of a Han Solo origin, as well as a new representative. But when I compare that blockbuster to what’s in theaters today, or even the ninth episode, Solo comes out better in my head. And what if Lord and Miller could finish it.
Unfortunately, the pair of directors and screenwriters had too much fun with their own creativity and didn’t pay attention to Lucasfilm’s strict work ethic, so after a while Kennedy took them away and called her friend Ron Howard, who finished it after them. The result was a non-offensive, but at the same time not very exciting film, which had the misfortune of arriving half a year after The Last Jedi. The version from the producers of the animated Spider-Man would probably be quite different, more relaxed, funnier, wilder, but it’s hard to say whether it’s better or universally more popular. It’s still Star Wars, after all, and Kennedy’s concerns that the creators were straying too far from what makes Star Wars Star Wars may well have been valid. I would like to see the experiment anyway.
Just like the Maul sequel that was so heavily teased at the end of the movie. That’s where Solo really became interesting for me, and I’m extremely sorry that I’ll never find out how the creators wanted to follow up on this, and what adventures young Han Solo and his band of smugglers and thieves had ahead of him.
Duel of the Fates
As with the previous films, this one was firmly tied to one director. Duel of the Fates was originally supposed to be the ninth film in the Skywalker saga directed by Colin Trevorrow, who in 2015 joined the club of billionaires (or builders of billion-dollar hits) with Jurassic World. Two years later, however, his film Henry’s Diary burned brutally in cinemas, and coincidentally at that time Disney announced that Trevorrow was ending his career. Supposedly it was caused by “creative differences”, but god knows. Anyway, his script and plot were largely trashed, leaving only a skeleton. What was the movie supposed to be about?
Kylo Ren was looking for an old Sith master in him, whom he found and subsequently trained under. Palpatine was trained by the same master. A lot of the action then took place on Coruscant, which was under the control of the First Order, the final battle was supposed to take place above the planet, i.e. the mirror opposite of Revenge of the Sith. In addition, the script was written before the death of Carrie Fisher, so Leia survived the events of the film. As for Rey, she was still trying to deal with her destiny, but she was more torn between whether she would end up good or bad. She and Ren were then supposed to battle it out in a lightsaber duel in the afterlife realm of Mortis, which appeared in the animated Clone Wars as well as this year’s Ahsoka. It’s hard to say if it would turn out better than the version from Abrams, but at least on paper it sounds more logical.
Boba Fett: Star Wars Story
The Boba Fett movie has had so many versions and so many possible combinations of creators that it is perhaps impossible to mention them all without forgetting one. There were two primary ones. Josh Trank’s version and James Mangold’s version. Neither of them saw the light of day (duh…), but with a bit of exaggeration I dare to say that both would be better than the hell that arose after them.
The Boba Fett: Law of the Underworld series was quite possibly the worst way to bring the iconic character back to the screens. Here, Fett became a senile grandfather incapable of making his own decisions, who relied on the Guardian of the Universe as his personal security, and then the whole plot around him was reduced to one episode. The rest consisted of uninteresting supporting characters, a boring plot about protecting the city, parodies of female gangsters, lol action and one Mandalorian episode. No kidding. I honestly still refuse to believe that this was a real Star Wars project, but it clearly found its fans (hello Dura), so I can only fantasize about what it would have been like if Mangold could have made his dirty western years ago a version in which, for example, Boba would also do something.
2023-12-06 16:00:00
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